I was sitting with my back against the wall and the box open beside me and a letter in my hands. Not reading it. Just holding it. The paper was cream-colored and the handwriting was looped and careful and the envelope had my name on it in a hand that had been writing my name for years.
He knocked twice on the open door.
Looked at me. At the box. At the letters.
He didn't say anything.
He came in and sat down on the floor beside me — not close, the careful distance, but close enough — and looked at the middle distance the way he looked at things when he was being present rather than managing.
We sat there.
I opened the letter.
It was the first one — postmarked not long after I'd been taken, written in the halting way of someone writing through grief that is still raw and immediate.
